by Julia Fierro
She had drained the remainder of her allowance account for the first visits to the fertility doctor, and then the Clomid treatments, and the artificial insemination attempts with Brad’s sperm. When Chase turned two and a half, they’d been trying for a second baby for twenty months. Her fortieth birthday loomed. She knew other women would have been patient, kept trying until they conceived naturally. Forty wasn’t that old, especially in Brooklyn. Twenty months wasn’t that long. But Leigh had never wanted anything so badly. Enough to steal. When Charlotte was finally conceived, Leigh felt certain that the risk she’d taken—the first of her life—had been worth it. She had sworn to herself that, when her new baby was born, she wouldn’t love Chase any less.
Now, rocking slowly in the chair, staring at the blue light of her phone screen, an anxious sweat coated Leigh’s upper lip as she remembered Tiffany’s grip on her arm that afternoon when Leigh had tried to walk away, tried to avoid surrendering Tenzin.
She had almost fallen asleep in the rocking chair, her chest sticky with Chase’s sweat, when her phone vibrated. Another text from Tiffany.
look out your window at exactly 12:35 don’t forget!!
When her phone read 12:32, Leigh rose from the rocking chair, Chase deadweight in her arms. Her back throbbed, but still she went to the window, Tiffany’s command like the call of a mythological siren luring her forward.
blast from the past
Allie
Allie set matching sippy cups of water at the foot of the air mattress where both boys slept in that tangle of arms and legs that still amazed her. Levi’s sunburned cheek rested on Dash’s shoulder. Dash’s right arm was flung across Levi’s chest.
Susanna waddled into the room, looking depleted, her perfumed wrist tucked under her nose.
“You okay there?” Allie asked.
Susanna let out a gassy burp, and Allie laughed. It was so un-Susanna. Allie guessed Susanna had been on one of her secret fridge raids.
“It’s not funny,” Susanna said. “I just puked my brains out.”
“Well,” Allie said, “it’s a good thing I’m the smart one in the family.”
Allie was relieved—comedy was her personal ice-breaker—when Susanna smiled.
“I hope they’re best friends forever,” Allie said, nodding at the sleeping boys and thinking of her own brother, a banker (a Catholic, for fucksake) and how he and she couldn’t have been more different. “You know, so they can look out for each other. Levi might need Dash to take care of him.”
“Come on, Allie,” Susanna said, “we have to create positive expectations, so the boys can strive to meet them.”
When had Susanna turned into a walking, talking inspirational poster? Allie wondered.
Susanna struggled to reach her bra clasp, the globe of her belly swerving from side to side.
“This effing bra’s killing me. Can you help me get it off, please?”
“Not until you say the F-word properly,” Allie said.
“Fine. Fuck.” Susanna stamped her foot. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”
The tops of Susanna’s heavy breasts jiggled, and Allie imagined kissing the milk white skin, using her tongue to trace the green veins that glowed so vividly in pregnancy, leading, like a map, to Susanna’s dark nipples.
“Good girl,” Allie said.
She slipped her hands inside Susanna’s maternity shirt, something shapeless and pastel from Old Navy or one of those stores that should be making uniforms instead of clothing.
Allie tried to remember Susanna’s flirtatious confidence, the self-righteous tilt of her head that had gripped Allie’s attention in the studio class she’d taught at Parsons years ago. Susanna the girl. Her dark hair in a ponytail that swung when she nodded during Allie’s lectures. Allie had gone home after each class with thoughts of that ponytail. Of winding it around her fist and pulling it so Susanna’s torso (unmarred by pregnancy) arched like a bow, Allie’s hand sliding into Susanna’s panties from behind. A living sculpture of taut curves.
She unhooked the three clasps of Susanna’s maternity bra. Her double-D body armor, they joked. Susanna’s breasts had been sore, filled with fibrous cysts, and Allie hadn’t held their weight in months.
“I miss your ponytail,” Allie whispered as she combed Susanna’s neat pixie cut with her fingers. “Remember? That first night?”
Allie dropped to one knee, and then on both, lifted Susanna’s shirt.
Susanna swatted her away and looked to the boys, her eyes wide in warning. She tried to step back, but Allie pulled the end of her long tee. Susanna stumbled forward.
“So?” Allie asked, ignoring the pain of her knees against the hardwood floor.
“The first night,” Susanna said, her voice deeper. Relenting, Allie thought.
She kissed Susanna’s navel. It had popped a week ago and was visible under her thin summer clothes. Allie had caught people looking at it when they walked down the street at home.
“Oh, yeah. The concert,” Susanna whispered. “You were such a god to me then.”
“And I’m not now?” Allie asked.
She ran the tip of her tongue around Susanna’s belly button; she could see the silvery pink scar where Susanna had pierced herself in college. Allie hummed quietly to imply pleasure and to hide the fact that she found the protrusion grotesque. Tumorlike. Remember, she told herself, this is where the umbilical cord begins, the life-sustaining nourishment. A fucking miracle.
Allie had been teaching at the Parsons School for Design less than a year when Susanna had registered for one, then two, and finally three of Allie’s four classes. Their relationship remained innocent although the tension of attraction was so strong that later Susanna would admit to dizzying panic attacks during student/teacher conferences in Allie’s small office overlooking Union Square. Mid–second semester, Allie got the call from her agent. It was the ten-minute class break, in which her classroom emptied, the students rushing outside to suck down a cigarette and refill their styrofoam coffee cups at the convenience store across the street. Her hand shook as she wrote down the details—the time of the Amtrak train, the hotel in Philly, and the name of the band’s manager, who would meet her in the hotel lobby in eight hours.
“Oh my God,” she said as she looked out into the classroom.
Susanna was sitting at a front-row desk, chatting with a friend of hers, a mousy and opinionated girl who annoyed Allie.
“What?” Susanna asked, and the breathy excitement in her voice startled Allie, made her want to share the thrill. So she told them. She was going to Philly to shoot Aerosmith in concert. For motherfucking Rolling Stone. The booked photographer was ill or something, and it was her gig now. After much oohing, aahing, and holyshitting, Allie had asked the girls if they wanted to come along, they could split the hotel room, and she’d score them some tickets. Hell yeah, the girls said, and Allie cut class short. They hopped in a cab, stopping only at Allie’s studio in Alphabet City to pick up her equipment, where Allie had liked the way Susanna studied every photo, book, tchotchke. Allie bought the train tickets, then food in the dining car, and they talked about art. Well, Allie talked mostly, and the girls listened with eager eyes and parted lips. Like delicate glass pitchers waiting to be filled, Allie remembered thinking.
It would become one of the most important nights of her life, the story that she’d tell for years after; at conferences, in classes she taught, to new acquaintances she hoped to impress, one of the few stories she would use to define who she is, was, and who she had always wanted to be.
She had taken her position onstage in darkness. The dim lights in the massive amphitheater seemed a primordial glow, the shuffling and whispering and intermittent shouts of the crowd like a dam ready to spill. She could just make out the silhouette of the band. The chords rang out, and the crowd detonated.
“More lights,” she called into the wings, and then louder, louder, shouting. It was too dark. The shots would be weak. She moved out onto the stage, standing wh
ere she knew the lighting dude could see her. She lifted her arms from her waist to above her head, again and again, like some crazy fucking referee in a football game, and there was an explosion of light, and a maelstrom of noise from the crowd, and it would always seem to her that the band let loose at exactly that moment. Allie would always feel as if she, like a conductor, had brought it all to life.
Allie tugged at the thick waistband of Susanna’s maternity pants until they lay in a pile at Susanna’s feet.
“We fucked our brains out that night,” Allie said, as she slid Susanna’s peach-colored panties down her legs, the fraying elastic stretching under her fingertips.
“That’s a romantic way of putting it.” Susanna laughed breathily.
Allie slid her palms up Susanna’s thighs.
“Oh, now, come on,” she said as she led Susanna, one hand in hers, to the bed. “You used to like talking dirty. What was that fantasy you had? The one in the stable? With the saddle?”
“The boys will hear,” Susanna whispered.
“They’re wiped out, babe,” Allie said.
She gripped Susanna’s elbow with one hand, Susanna’s hand with the other, and slowly guided her down onto the bed. Allie’s arms shook under the strain. Susanna had always been bigger—in height, in personality. In the impromptu photos they had taken over the years, their faces side by side, crowding the frame, even the features of Susanna’s face seemed more three-dimensional next to Allie’s own child-sized mouth and close-set eyes.
“Scoot back,” Allie commanded as she crawled onto the bed, using her toes to kick off her black motorcycle boots.
She felt sexy. Like a jaguar stalking prey, its haunches rising and falling. But the sight of Susanna trying to pull her body back on the bed snagged the moment. It was an awkward scuttle that made Allie think of the crabs the children had squealed over on the beach that afternoon.
Finally, Susanna fell onto her back with a groan, her knees falling apart in a position that felt too gynecological, like yet another appointment at the fertility doctor, where the waiting room was filled with sad women, their eyebrows lifted in a pathos that revolted Allie, as if they could see nothing more of themselves than an empty shell waiting to be filled. Once upon a time, she had been attracted to the kind of girl who wore that look, the ones that needed a teacher, not at all as innocent as they thought themselves to be.
Susanna had been different. Sure, she had been impressionable, eager to see meaning in every tag of graffiti on a concrete wall, every dead pigeon at the park, every Manhattan sunset burning with radiant colors only smog can birth. But it was Susanna who had been Allie’s teacher, who had transformed Allie from a photographer who shot celebrities and supermodels with unblemished bodies and symmetrical features, to an artist who photographed the wrinkled hands of an Iranian peasant. The scabbed limbs of a Sudanese refugee. The ravaged body of a Bronx AIDS baby.
The tip of Allie’s tongue circled Susanna’s clit until Allie heard her sigh from beyond the massive globe of flesh that stood like a wall between them.
“Oh,” Susanna whispered. “Yes.”
But Allie wanted to focus on what she was feeling, the zing in her throat the memory of the concert had awakened, that made her want to touch herself and think of other women, the young and lean and horny girls of her past—including herself—who lived on in her fantasies.
She rose to her knees and pulled her tee over her head. She’d never needed a bra, and the male glances at the dots of her nipples poking through her thin tee shirts satisfied her in an almost-intellectual way. A little curious. A little vengeful.
The cool breeze sifting through the window screen made her skin ripple with a chill, and she leaned over Susanna’s belly (Tell me if I hurt you, she said) and rubbed her hardened nipples against Susanna’s chest. But the way Susanna’s breasts fell to each side, the flat field of skin between a sickly white in the moonlight, made Allie close her eyes. As they slid together, Allie’s prickled skin warmed and she conjured another Susanna—a ponytailed Susanna, her breasts high and firm, a V of young cleavage resting between them as she sat atop another Allie in a hotel room in Philly, their pelvic bones grinding, their tongues twining, the bedsheet wet.
They tried, but Susanna’s belly was like an unscalable mountain, and Susanna let out a giggle (Sorry, the baby kicked), and Allie was certain Susanna’s moans were too even to be authentic. Finally, Susanna tapped, then slapped Allie on the shoulder, whispering, “Stop, stop. Help me up!”
Allie lifted her face from between Susanna’s legs, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and gripped Susanna’s forearm. Susanna slid off the bed and onto her knees, a blur of loose white flesh. She wrapped a towel around herself, a butt cheek exposed, and hurried into the hall.
A few minutes later, Allie heard retching in the bathroom next door. Then the sound of water running through pipes. Then more retching.
Should she go in there? What could she do, really? Susanna had thrown up so many times with this baby. My baby, Allie thought, and then, our baby. It was part of the day’s routine, Susanna running to the bathroom to puke.
Allie lay on the bed and listened for more of the moans she’d heard earlier from down the hall, hoping (she surprised herself) that Tiffany and her man had gone for another round. But there was only Susanna’s heaving, Levi’s snoring, and Dash’s even breathing. The sounds of family.
She rolled onto her stomach, slipped her hand under her hips, and touched herself, rubbing in circles, the way she had always liked it, her face pressed into a pillow. She imagined Tiffany, one breast loosed from a diaphanous gown, her stare coy but inviting. Like Drost’s Bathsheba, whose eyes, Allie had thought on her first trip to the Louvre, shone with desire. She held her breath when she came. Levi mumbled. Dash’s hand crawled around his head until he found his pacifier.
She cleaned her fingers with a diaper wipe and pulled on a tank top. As she rummaged in her duffel for a pair of leggings, she heard feminine laughter outside, drifting up from the deck below. Then a voice: “Don’t! The rocks. You’ll kill yourself.”
Allie moved to the window and parted the thin synthetic curtains.
On top of the seawall, illuminated by a bright moon, stood Tiffany. She was naked, her hair loose around her, black against the blue-white of her back. She gazed straight ahead, as if in a trance.
She’s going to jump, Allie thought with a wave of panic as Tiffany rose to her toes—the shift of muscle under skin catching the moonlight—and dove off the wall.
There was a soft splash, then the black water rippled.
the coast is clear
Nicole
Nicole huddled on a lounge chair on the deck, her sweater pulled over her knees.
She sucked hard to keep the joint lit against the whip of the wind. Each gust pulled a trail of sparks over the seawall.
The weed had done little to numb her dread. Under the vast starry dome, the unknowable dwarfed her, and she felt more mortal than ever. Insignificant. Impermanent.
“God, you are such a narcissistic self-pitying freak,” she whispered aloud to crack the chain of worrying.
She thought of her mother, who was always calling Nicole to tell her that she was praying for her and for Wyatt, and even for Josh (aka the Jew Nicole had married). When something good happened, like when her first book sold, or when Josh was promoted, her mother’s response was, “My prayers have been answered!” As if, Nicole thought, her mother was trying to take credit for Nicole’s life, for the never-ending pile of decisions she struggled to make.
She picked a piece of rolling paper from her lip and watched the yellow-tinged wisps of cloud hurry across black sky. She tried to imagine God, the white-bearded Father in flowing robes she had known as a child, who, she had imagined, hovered somewhere up there, his muscled arm reaching down toward his children on earth.
“Thunder’s just the angels bowling,” her mother had told a young Nicole when she’d been frightened during summer
storms. What a comfort that had been. When Nicole had learned, in seventh grade Earth Science, the real cause, the clash of cold and hot air, she’d been ashamed, wondering how could she have been so stupid.
What she’d give to be a girl again, believing in prayers, sleeping under the simpatico eyes of a Jesus who hung above her bed in a gold plastic frame. Before her mother left for Florida that July, they’d had the same futile God conversation.
“I can’t make myself believe, Mom.”
“Well,” her mother had said, “you certainly could try a bit harder.”
Nicole flinched as a fantasy shot through her mind like a film. Couldn’t it happen any minute now? Like in the movies? A flash of light that fills every inch of the sky with the purest white, then a vacuum suck and a huge expelling, a wind trampling the earth with the force of a billion rabid horses with plutonium hooves.
She heard movement behind her and spun around with a frightened sound, more animal than human.
A tittering Tiffany appeared in baggy sweatpants and Michael’s black motorcycle jacket.
“Shit,” Nicole whispered, rolling her eyes. “You scared me.”
“Don’t drop the joint, whatever you do,” Tiffany said with a smile.
Nicole laughed and raised the joint along with her eyebrows. An offering. A howl of wind carried off orange sparks.
Tiffany huddled next to her, each on one of two chaise lounges pulled side by side. They wrapped beach towels around their shoulders and tucked them over their legs. The thick black leather of Michael’s jacket creaked as Tiffany lifted the joint to her mouth. Nicole cupped her hands around the glowing ember and saw the smudged mascara ringing Tiffany’s eyes.
